ABSTRACT
The constant pressure to improve profitability has led the poultry industry to prefer birds that are efficient feed converters, grow fast and have high lean meat content with minimum production costs. This has been made possible thanks to improvements in the genetic selection of breeds. However, this has resulted in animals that are much more susceptible to environmental stressors and frequently develop muscular abnormalities that are responsible for great variations in meat quality (Petracci and Berri, 2017; Baldi et al., 2020). As meat moves along the distribution line from processors to the final consumer, quality becomes progressively more important. For this reason, intra- and inter-flock variations in poultry meat quality have been extensively investigated over the past 20 years (Dong et al., 2020a).
